Get Firefox 3 early

It’s five hours till the official release of Firefox 3. We know your hands are sweating in anticipation, waiting to click that download link and contribute to the greatest World Record known to man… What? You don’t want your browser to have all the notoriety afforded to fat twins? Well then, let’s just go grab the file now since they’re already on the mirrors.

First, pick out a mirror from the official list. Navigate to the the directory of the Firefox 3.0 release: /pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/ You’ll be greeted by a message that says, “We’re not quite ready yet!” and that “Downloading them directly can harm our ability to distribute Firefox efficiently.” Also, you won’t be in the world record count. Think about that, jerk. All releases are named using a consistent pattern. Looking at an earlier release you can determine that the Mac version of 3.0 will be named: Firefox 3.0.dmg Add on the OS and language directories and it will look like this: /pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0/mac/en-US/Firefox%203.0.dmg

Thats not nice. Theres a reason that your supposed to wait till 5UTC – it wont be counted by the guiness book of records if it’s downloaded before. The links arnt a secret – you can get them off mozilla, it’s just they specifically ask you not to:

[quote]

The files in the FTP directories of our mirrors are – for now – only meant to be used by our testers. We would appreciate it if our fans didnât follow direct links there that they might see on sites like Digg, Reddit, or Neowin. Downloading them directly can harm our ability to distribute Firefox efficiently, and will also not be counted as part of our attempt to set a Guiness World Record for the most software downloads in a day.

have you tried removing third party add-ons with memory leaks such as ABP and the like? srsly, i’ve been using FF3 since i upgraded to ubuntu 8.04 and the only issues i’ve had are due to broken third party mods i removed until they were patched.

So the folks at the Mozilla Foundation who are providing this product for no cost and Google who are providing some extra bandwidth should wait until 4 PM their local time to release Firefox 3? What if something goes wrong with the downloading a couple hours in? Would you want to be the poor sap that gets called in while you’re in the middle of eating supper (… or in the middle of something else).

Also, it’s not so much that it’s USA-centric as “Mozilla Foundation”-centric (and to a point Google-centric) as they are both headquartered out of Mountain View, California which just so happens to be in the USA . If they were headquartered in, say, London, they would probably release at 10:00 GMT instead.

They provide you a nice product that you use. They don’t ask for anything in return. If you like it so much you MUST have it (in which case use the RC candidate like everyone else and wait for the autoupdate – and I’ll still download it just for the count) then when they do ask you for a small favour that doesn’t require you to go out of your way, honour it. They spend their time and lives so you have a good browser. It’s doesn’t cost you shit. And you get to bitch and whine when it doesn’t do something right and they’ll fix it. And it still doesn’t cost you shit. Even if you could care less about promoting the browser, just do it to keep them happy. It’s called courtesy.

The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!). Our servers are currently feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly. Download day will officially commence once the site goes live. The 24 hours period will be clocked from that moment. Thanks for your continued support.